Chapter 1

Mikalina

"You're crazy."

"This is ridiculous."

"Are you going through some kind of crisis?"

I closed my eyes as my parents" words reverberated in my head. After a moment, I reopened them and stared out the little airplane window.

Apparently, quitting your shitty job to pack up and leave for an undetermined amount of time and flying across the ocean to first sightsee through another continent before settling in a tiny Eastern European village in the middle of nowhere was now what constituted someone being mentally unstable. At least in my parents' eyes.

God, I hate the window seat, I thought ideally, bitching at no one yet feeling like the idiot my mother called me right before I left for the airport.

But when you do a spur of the moment thing like—oh, I don"t know—empty out your savings, quit your job, and fly across the world for a little adventure, beggars can't be choosers.

I rubbed my eyes, dropped my hands to my lap, and saw the flight attendant start to come by. After calling her over, I gave an awkward smile to the person in the center seat, since I had to lean toward them in order to be heard.

"Can I get some booze?" Lord, yeah, I actually said that, asked it that way. "I-I mean, can I get a Bloody Mary?"

The flight attendant smiled and nodded before leaving. After giving my center seat neighbor another forced smile, which got me an equally tight—and very annoyed—grimace in return, I focused out the window again.

Before long, the flight attendant was coming back with my Bloody Mary. I didn't even care for alcohol all that much, and didn't like tomato juice either, but hell, since I was in the mind frame recently of doing things out of character, I just went with it.

First stop was landing in London. I planned on sightseeing for a couple of days before taking the Eurostar to Paris and checking out the catacombs. After that, a few more stops—Germany, Hungary, Poland. Then I'd end my little "vacation" as I headed east and settled on a tiny Romanian village nestled in the Carpathian Mountains.

Sounded pretty cut and dry to me, and despite trying to act like this was the best idea in the world... I was terrified.

I didn't know the land. I didn't know the language. And taking this trip was like throwing pudding against a tree and hoping it stuck.

But I'd been at a point in my life where everything else seemed lost. It felt as though I was running around in a circle, taking four left turns and always ending up at the same spot.

If all else failed and this trip turned out to be the worst idea ever, at least I'd have experienced a little more in life.

And that couldn't be so wrong, right?